This is the first real art I’ve been able to do in over a year. :3 ‘Course this is just a WIP, but still, I’m so excited that my health has finally improved enough for me to draw!

This is also my first project on my new mac powerbook. My old G4 died some weeks ago. Unfortunately it wasn’t until after I bought the $2.5K OSX Lion that I found out that my photoshop disks were too old to be supported by the new computer. D: So this is being done all on Manga Studio- a program I am not yet particularly familiar with. This is also my first time attempting colour on it. It’ll likely take a very long time to shade, but hopefully I’ll have the finished product up in time for Halloween.

Photoshop… I miss you…. *tears*

Fawna and Flowerlark are having fun with a jack-o-latern- only it seems Flowerlark has gotten herself in trouble yet again.

EDIT: The finished piece is now in the gallery.

Some of you may remember a year ago when I took commissions to fund some repairs that my computer needed. Well, what with my health being so unstable, it never got done and I’ve been limping along with a slow and finicky system this whole time. Last night my mac finally had enough and stopped working. It keeps putting itself to sleep every few minutes or seconds and often won’t wake up until I pop the battery out and force it to reboot. We’re taking it to apple to look at it, but it’s really looking like I need a new computer. Even if we fix the old one it’s so outdated it can’t run a lot of the new software. So I’ll likely not be online much until I have a working system (I’m doing this update from my DSi which is rather awkward and very slow). Apologies for all comments and e-mails that may go unanswered for some time.

Most people play video games to take a break from the frustrations of life. However, fast-paced and difficult games can be anything but a relaxing experience. Fortunately there are a wealth of ‘casual games’ out there for those of us who want to chill out instead of getting writer’s cramp from gripping our styluses so hard. And those who are also artistic or even just a little creative, can look no further for a soothing experience than Infinite Dream’s DSiWare download, Let’s Create! Pottery.

Let’s Create! Pottery is about exactly what you think it is. It’s a pottery making simulation. You are given a wheel and a cylinder of clay and must use the DSi stylus to shape it. Once you are happy with it it can be fired and painted and decorations added. When you’re pleased with the final result, you can fire your glaze and then either save your piece in a gallery or auction it off to earn coins to buy more colours, patterns, and clays from the shop. Initially you will get commissions from in-game characters where you must match your piece to the provided photograph as exactly as possible. Don’t expect to be able to get the full 10 stars for every piece, though. The game’s controls are finicky enough to make getting full marks on everything pretty much impossible.

The commission section of the game is also incredibly short. You get to fashion about a dozen pots for others before it’s over, leaving you with no more goals to work towards. All that’s left is the zen experience of making pots. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it gets dull fast.

In all, Let’s Create! Pottery is a nice game while the appeal lasts. Unfortunately that is a fairly short span of time unless you just really like making virtual pottery for no other reason than for the enjoyment of it. The beautiful graphics and soothing forest sounds make for an excellent relaxing game, but for $5, the amount of content is seriously lacking.

There are some games out there that really shine. They have the opportunity to make something great and they do, exceeding all expectations. Then there’s games that you can tell have tremendous potential, but it is never exploited, and instead of a great game you get a watered down version of something that could have been amazing. Ubisoft Quebec’s game Battle of Giants: Dragons (Combat of Giants in some regions) for the Nintendo DS is one of the latter.

The race of noble dragons was once hunted by mankind for the powerful gems they protected. A fierce battle raged against humans and dragons. Eventually the noble dragons emerged victorious, however, they were severely weakened. The fallen dragons took this opportunity to plunge the dragon world Tammabukku into an age of darkness that would last 100 years. Now a you, a young descendent of the noble dragons, must recapture the powerful gems the fallen dragons stole and become the new Dragon Lord.

It all sounds a lot more exciting than it ended up being.

Battle of Giants: Dragons is basically a fighting game. You explore 3 areas in each of the 4 different regions of Tammabukku, the air, ice, fire, and earth regions, battling every dragon you encounter. Two of these dragons in each level hold special elemental gems that allow for more and more powerful attacks, depending on whether you equip the gems that match your dragon’s element. At the start of the game you can choose one of the four elements, each of which has a special ability (regeneration for ice and wind dragons, poison for earth, burning for fire). You get to customise your dragons appearance (my favourite part of the game) and will unlock new body parts and colours as you go. Once you clear all 12 levels as one element of dragon, you must choose another until you’ve played through as all 4 dragons. There is also a multiplayer feature in which you can pit your dragons against your friends’ with up to four players battling in turns.

Everything is controlled with the stylus. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but button controls would have made a lot more sense for a fighting game as they would allow for a more complex system of battling. As it is, the game is too simplistic. To battle, you simply attack, dodge, or block. Once you attack you must tap on the gem you want to use and then connect the dots on the screen to do damage. Outside of battle you are given goals in the field. Basically you fly around the map and burn crystals to unlock new areas or get the bad dragons to appear. Every now and then you get to smash a crystal instead of burning it, but don’t expect to get to do that too often. That would be, you know, too much variety. So as you can imagine, after the first dragon, things get pretty repetitive. Sometimes the levels are even exactly the same. There are hidden bosses in each level that can spice things up a bit. The game will pit you against things like a UFO, a robot, or a set of drums. But if you’re like me you’ll find this ridiculousness ruins the atmosphere of the game and simply skip those battles.

The aesthetics are by far this game’s best attribute. The dragons and backgrounds aren’t the best on the DS, but they are very beautiful- as is the music. They obviously put a lot more effort into the visual and audio aspects than into gameplay, and it was the awesome animations and pleasing aesthetics that made this game enjoyable for me (apart from the fact that I just REALLY love dragons).

This game seemed to have such enormous potential to really be amazing, and it was frustrating to find out that it didn’t exploit any of the opportunities it had to be great. Between stylus controls limiting the complexity of battle and the dull tasks to complete on the map, the game just fell flat. Though I actually did enjoy this game disproportionately to its quality. The simplistic gameplay and high repetition would be a turn-off to most players, but I would recommend it to both kids and those (like me) who just love to watch pretty dragons fly around and beat the crap out of each other.

EDIT: Hey look, as of 8/9/11 I’m #11 in the world rankings!

The French company Neko Entertainment (French company with a Japanese name? Huh?) was putting together a retail puzzler called DodoGo, yet for some reason or another, the game ended up being split in half and offered as two DSiWare downloads: DodoGo! and DodoGo! Challenge, both of which are big fish in a small pond- outshining most other games available in the e-shop.

It’s a tropical island in the time of the dinosaurs, and the dodos are in danger! A tidal wave has swept over their nests and scattered the eggs all over the island and adjacent islands, and it’s all up to you to get them safely back to their nests. But the diabolical Caiman Vinicius has his eyes on some eggcellent dinners, and goes about setting all the animals on the islands against the eggs.

If you’ve played Mario vs Donkey Kong: March of the minis, then you’ll be familiar with DodoGo’s gameplay style. You are given a certain number of tools to use on each of the 160 normal levels and 32 bonus levels that comprise DodoGo! and DodoGo! Challenge, which you must use strategically to get the eggs in the nest and in a good mood. With these tools you can alter the landscape in order to avoid hazards that will lead the Dodo eggs to their doom and ultimately, their extinction (though you kind of have to wonder what the point is when they went extinct anyway). The ways in which you manipulate the stages are nearly endless. You can blast, burn, cut, spring, dig, smash… the list goes on and on. And not only are there hazards in the landscape, but some levels contain the animals that Vinicius has pitted against you. These animals must either be avoided or used to your advantage. You are awarded medals based on your performance at the end of each level. The goal is to save at least one egg in each level, though you must save all of them to get a medal. In the bonus levels you control an automated robo-egg. Your goal in these is to collect all the targets scattered about in order to unlock goodies like new avatars, disguises for your eggs and jokers, which can be used to skip the exceptionally nasty levels.

The game is played using all touch controls, though the D-pad can be used to scroll about the area (or the ABXY buttons if you’re left-handed), which is extremely helpful as you work on the many tricky puzzles.

As far as aesthetics go, the game is very pleasing. The stylised cel-shaded graphics and catchy music fit the goofy theme of the game. The soundtracks during the actual levels do a good job of staying in the background and not getting annoying if you’re struggling for a long time on a particularly devious puzzle.

Their are a few drawbacks, though my gripes are small. The controls usually go smoothly, but can be touchy, especially when you need to stop an egg from blundering into a hazard. They won’t always respond to your commands which led to quite a few do-overs. DodoGo also had it’s fair share of bugs. Sometimes an egg would die but I could still see it there, though it was like a ghost and completely unresponsive to any commands. Also in Dodogo Challenge, one of the cutscenes seemed to be missing its sound. Then there are disguises that you can equip to your eggs to make the experience extra-silly. The disguises are different in DodoGo! and DodoGo! Challenge, yet in Challenge when you equip a disguise, it appears in the levels as one of the disguises from the first game. It may not impede your puzzle-solving, but it is slightly annoying.

DodoGo! is a game full of charm. Those silly, laughing eggs can’t help but make you smile as the roll and bounce about the levels to their nests. Not only that, but it’s a challenging game that will stretch the limits of your creativity and ability to think outside the box. Though the initial tutorial levels go a bit slowly, you’ll soon find yourself immersed in a wealth of tricky and varied levels that really require your best thinking cap to get through. And the replayability is high because you’ll want to keep doing levels over to get the highest score on each. While it does have some drawbacks DodoGo! is by far the best and most fun puzzle game I have ever played. It’s well worth the $8 (plus $5 if you want to pick up Challenge as well) and then some. I have a hard time figuring out why this didn’t become a retail game, because it’s certainly more than good enough.